Effect of Partial Replacement of Soybean and Corn with Dietary Chickpea (Raw, Autoclaved, or Microwaved) on Production Performance of Laying Quails and Egg Quality

Abstract This study was conducted to investigate whether adding different levels of raw or differently processed chickpea into different diets of laying quails affected live weight, feed intake, feed efficiency, egg weight and internal and external egg quality. Chickpea was used as raw, autoclaved or microwave-processed, and it was involved in the diets on two different levels (20% and 40%). The sample was divided into 7 groups including the control, 20% and 40% raw, 20% and 40% autoclaved, and 20% and 40% microwave-processed groups. 336 ten-week-old female laying quails were used in the study, and the experiment continued for 19 weeks. In the study, the differences among the groups were insignificant in terms of live weight, feed intake, feed efficiency, egg weight and egg quality characteristics such as shell thickness, shell weight, yolk weight, yolk color and albumin index. The differences were significant in terms of the shape index, Haugh unit (p<0.05) and yolk index (p<0.01). Consequently, it was observed that different thermal processes on chickpeas did not usually have a significant effect on the yield performance of the quails, and the results that were obtained were similar to the other groups. However, it was determined that some egg quality characteristics were affected by the autoclaving and microwaving processes. Between the thermal processes, it may be stated that autoclaving provided better results.